Will this year’s winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award be funny? It’s a serious question. Last year, Bridget Christie won the Eddie (as it’s called, since no longer being the Perrier) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a show that resembled a sociology lecture with just a few more moments of comic relief than you might expect at a good university. And she was a deserving winner, representative of where comedy’s vanguard is headed.

While feelgood gag-and-punchline stand-up is bigger than ever, with Michael McIntyre and John Bishop and Sarah Millican filling arenas, a certain stratum of comedians have already moved on to a place where the audience is laughing inside rather than out, or not at all. Their leader is Stewart Lee (coincidentally or not, Christie’s husband), essentially a sarcastic monologist who makes use of comic techniques to make a social or political point. Others have found their own way to a similar position, with differing degrees of pill-sweetening gag-telling. Rob Newman uses humour to illustrate historical analysis, Mark Steel and Josie Long to leaven grassroots politics. Robin Ince talks about science. Russell Brand prances between speaking for his generation and talking about his “winky”, enraging and delighting and confusing as he goes.

What these performers share is a root in the alternative comedy of the 1980s, and a view of comedy as art rather than craft. Whether they’ve reached their current act through choice or necessity (some, you sense, just weren’t very good at telling jokes), they all believe comedy has to mean something; it’s not enough to be funny. Without the Comedy Store generation, they would have been politicians, novelists, satirists or, in Brand’s case, a rock singer or cult leader. They might have been restricted to a pitch on Speaker’s Corner.

The desire to do more than crack jokes comes from them, but they’ve also been driven off their patch by the increasing ubiquity of comedy. Politics and public life now necessitate having, along with a favourite pop band and type of biscuit, a “sense of humour”. Politicians must win over the audience on Have I Got News For You, then out-wit haters, pedants and professional writers on Twitter. Newsnight feels the need to interview Muppets and insert comic dances. Radio 4’s PM programme is conducted throughout in a tone of arch dryness. Comedy’s reaction is either to go with the flow (the arena-fillers), go to extremes (Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr) or go somewhere else. Jokes are devalued currency. Hence Stewart Lee’s dripping self-loathing whenever he approaches anything like a joke or Josie Long’s exaggerated surprise when she stumbles on a gag.

Oddly, a group of American comics seem to have reached a similar position by other means. Louis CK’s show Louie can raise a laugh – stand-up segments of the show prove that – but he increasingly doesn't seem very interested in doing so. Instead, he makes films about losing his daughter on the subway, or remembering his teenage dope-smoking experiences. Marc Maron, whose own show Maron begins on the Fox channel on 14 August, is a similar semi-autobiographical sitcom, but even lower on chuckles. You might laugh at his inability to live at anything below the most heightened levels of anxiety and paranoia, but you won’t feel great about it. Like Lena Dunham’s Girls, these are “comedy shows” only because we’ve been told they are.

Compared with their British counterparts, they’re more about self-reflection, looking deeper inwards rather than further out, more spiritual than political. At first glance they seem shallower, but they may well turn out to tell us more about how we’re living in an age of stress, self-obsession and technology worship. In Britain, the progression has thrown up a circle of interesting, eccentric and varied performers but the ultimate destination could be a dead-end: comedy as political or moral lecture. The American reaction is, essentially, to chain Michael McIntyre’s crowd-pleasing observations about the minutiae of everyday behaviour to an anchor of existential dread. Imagine that squeaky giggle tipping into hysteria, the stage-pacing given a manic edge, the gentle observations magnified into loathing. That’s a show to win the Eddies, surely.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.